Articles by Mark JW Graham | Nottingham Vocal Coach & Singing Technique Expert

January 18, 2026January 18, 2026

The Songs That Taught Me The Most About Singing

I’ve talked before about how some songs are more helpful for the voice, and some songs are less helpful for the voice.

A semi-regular discussion I have with clients is closely related: certain songs don’t just test your voice — they actively teach you about great singing.

Start Simple

When people first learn piano or guitar, they often want to play popular songs — basic three- or four-chord material they can jam along to. That’s helpful for getting started, but it’s usually more about establishing basic competency than understanding the inner workings of music.

As people become more established, they often choose more challenging pieces. The common mistake is pursuing challenge for its own sake, faster, harder, more intense, more complex — without recognising often these songs are just about “MORE”, rather than making you a truly better singer/musician.

By contrast, some pieces appear simple on the surface, but hide complex mechanics underneath. The challenge is covert, not overt. Learning songs like this teaches you why music is written the way it is, and what subtle functions you must observe for it to work. The more skilled the composer, the more advanced musical concepts you get to experience “from the inside”.

The Same Is True for Voice

When I first started singing, I didn’t have much range. I was restricted in what I could sing, so I worked my way up through the material I enjoyed at the time: U2, Sting, Jimi Hendrix, John Mayer, and so on.

Nearly 20 years on, I’m not limited by range in the same way. I can attempt much more demanding material by more advanced singers — for example: Stevie Wonder and Ellis Hall.

Here’s the key issue: some songs ask a very narrow question of your voice, repeatedly. A song like Where The Streets Have No Name (and plenty of similar repertoire) largely comes down to one requirement: can you repeatedly jump from a D4 to an A4 with conviction? If you can do that one move, you can sing the song. If you can’t, the song is basically inaccessible.

This is one reason singers get so frustrated when trying to sing favourite songs too early. Their technical competence isn’t high enough, their musicality isn’t high enough, and the songs they want to sing often demand one specific “voice move” with a binary success/fail outcome. That move can sound impressive in that context, but it doesn’t necessarily develop broad, transferable skill.

Over time, I realised that the songs which developed my voice the most weren’t necessarily the most famous or “impressive” on paper — but the ones that demanded multiple blended vocal skills simultaneously.

The Songs That Taught Me the Most

For Your Love — Stevie Wonder

This is not the greatest song in the world. Stevie used it as a vehicle to demonstrate his range and work on his voice. But the way the verses and choruses make different demands on you provides tremendous insight into what good singing should feel like.

The verses demand fluidity and depth in the lower range, but you also must be able to climax with strength on the highest notes of the verses (around F#4 in the first male bridge, in the main). Then you must be able to ascend into the second bridge with ease, which requires a wholly different feel — yet you must make those approaches blend.

From there, the song steps up key by key, testing congruency and continuity across your range. It becomes progressively more climactic — you can’t bail out or go light at any point. It builds stamina within good technique, or you don’t make it.

They Won’t Go When I Go — Stevie Wonder vs George Michael

If For Your Love is overtly hard, They Won’t Go When I Go is the covert one. You have to make many of the same “voice moves” as For Your Love, but the emphasis sits lower — especially in the verses — while still requiring you to climb into a similar range for the climaxes.

On top of that, you have to move repeatedly between the first and second bridge and sound climactic without over-muscling. It’s all the challenge of For Your Love, at pace — and you have to make it sound smooth and easy.

George Michael performed his version down one semitone. That single change significantly alters the demands of the melody. The climactic notes sit differently across the bridges and produce a different overall feel in the voice.

In part, this reflects a limitation and an intelligent stylistic choice. George’s “second bridge” area (around A4) was not his most refined zone. If you go through his catalogue and note the ranges he tends to climax in, you’ll often find that he anchors major top notes around Ab4 — avoiding the need to live in that higher bridge territory. When he does sing above that, he often goes lighter, creating a stylistic flip for those notes (you can hear this in songs like Kissing a Fool, as well as in this performance).

This isn’t a criticism — it’s a perfect demonstration of how elite singers make intelligent technical choices around their strengths. And it means this song has a lot to teach in both keys: the original, and the semitone-down adaptation.

If you’re struggling with certain songs (whether on the simpler end or the harder end), and want to figure these out in your own voice, you can book in to work with me via the button below.

January 11, 2026January 11, 2026

Four things I learnt about singing from my broken foot

For those who may remember, I broke my foot over Christmas. I rolled over my ankle – didn’t even fall down – but a VERY loud crack was audible, like thick bamboo being snapped. And the rest is history.

It’s been about 3 weeks since the original injury. As a result of being a husband, father, and business owner, I’ve got a lot of responsibilities I HAVE to deal with in the week. As a self employed person there is no sick pay, there’s no “emergency cover”, and no immediate family to help me out.

Consequently, as soon as the initial swelling started to go down, I had to get onto the rehabilitation.

Recovery

Now I’ve had MANY injuries and setbacks over the years, so in a weird way, I actually enjoy the day-to-day project of getting my body working again. In many respects, it reflects the nature of both building a great singing voice, and then maintaining it in the face of colds, chest infections, laryngitis etc.

I wrote an article years ago about the things I’d learned from taking up yoga – the body awareness, the nature of it as a regular practice, etc. This week, I thought I’d explain four things I’ve started to learn from dealing with this broken foot, and how I really do see that mirrored in voice training and singing.

1. Range of motion

Even the morning after the injury, I started gently checking the range of motion of my foot. Not shoving it to its extremes and pushing past pain, but cautiously exploring what I could do, what I couldn’t, and what the implications of the damage might be.

I’ve done that multiple times a day every day since then. Drawing circles with the feet, pointing toes, bringing feet to 90°, comparing it side by side with the healthy foot, etc.

The vocal equivalent of this is simple: voices don’t need to be slammed hard every day, but going through a full range of motion (i.e. literal range) with your voice most days is REMARKABLY helpful. It’s a little bit like “use it or lose it”.

2. Rest AND exercise

Recovery always lives in the tension between rest and use. We cannot WILL our way back to health, and we cannot exercise our way out of an injury or vocal problem. But equally, we cannot merely REST our way out of one either.

What’s required is a measured balance: checking in with your body every day, but NOT pushing it as hard as it will go. That is how we re-injure ourselves.

Which raises the obvious question: how do we know how far we can go? That leads us to point three.

3. Test the diagnosis daily

Any diagnosis is really a working hypothesis. The only way to refine it is through careful, low-risk testing over time.

Here’s the tricky thing. The fracture clinic said my foot was broken and I’d need to be in a rocker boot for 3–5 weeks. However, I’ve been able to walk without pain in secure footwear well before that.

A friend who is a consultant surgeon saw me walking in week two, and he commented: “That is not possible even on a hairline fracture – you should be in noticeable pain.”

This does not mean my foot is or is not broken. It simply means that the exact prognosis for any given individual is TRULY individual.

Some people with a given issue take a long time to regain function. Others take less time. Some encounter repeated setbacks. Others experience relatively plain sailing.

The point is this: whatever the current hypothesis is, do gentle exploratory check-ins to test it. You’re not trying to break the hypothesis (or yourself), but you ARE trying to refine your understanding of what you’re actually dealing with.

This sits between two unhelpful extremes: blindly accepting what you’ve been told and resting excessively, or ploughing on as if nothing is wrong.

4. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure

I’ve been going to the gym 2–3 times a week for just under a decade. I’m confident that the reason I didn’t go down when I broke my foot – and the reason I’m recovering faster than the original prognosis – is largely down to this.

Lifting weights doesn’t just strengthen muscles. It improves tendon function and tension, increases resilience, supports proprioception, and aids recovery – even in the face of the ravaging effects of getting older.

That long-term preparation makes a significant difference when something does go wrong.

The same principle applies to the voice. Far too many people get in touch for vocal help AFTER the problem has started – by which point there are often deeply ingrained habits and vocal weakness from a lack of good foundational training.

Maintenance matters. I see my PT every week, and often there’s nothing to report. But because he knows what my “normal” is, if something does crop up – a broken foot, back pain, or minor twinges – he can act immediately and appropriately.

The same is true for voice work.

Conclusion

All injuries take time. From previous broken bones, I expect to feel lingering effects from this one for many months, perhaps even years.

That said, I’m already back to around 95% of what I was doing before by applying the same principles throughout: daily feedback, restraint rather than force, and long-term preparation before problems arise.

These are the same protocols and preventative measures I apply to my own voice and to my clients’ voices.

If this resonates with you and you’re not already working with me, you’re very welcome to book in via the link below.

December 4, 2025December 6, 2025

Vocal Problems and Vocal Technique Troubleshooting

This guide explores common vocal problems and vocal technique troubleshooting need to deal with when their voice feels weak, tired, or unreliable. If your voice seems to have changed with age, illness, or overuse, these articles will help you understand what is happening and what you can realistically do about it.

Everything here is written from the perspective of a working vocal coach, so the focus is always on practical cause–and–effect and what you can change in your day-to-day singing.

Why voices become weak, tired or inconsistent
How age, illness and habits affect vocal strength
Technical causes of strain, shouting and instability
Practical troubleshooting for everyday singing

Editor’s Picks

Start with these core articles if your voice feels weak, inconsistent, or harder to use than it used to be:

What causes weak voices?
– Why some voices lack strength, and which causes are actually changeable.
My voice seems to have got worse as I’ve got older
– How ageing, habits, and training history affect the way a voice develops over time.
How different illnesses affect the voice
– What colds, COVID, reflux and other health issues really do to your sound.
How loud should I be singing?
– Understanding intensity so you’re not quietly straining or loudly shouting.
Shouting masquerading as singing
– Why “just pushing harder” often makes things worse, not better.
What happens to our voices in each decade
– How our voices change, when, and the physiological reasons why this happens.

If you’re interested in learning more about vocal technique, you can read more about our own vocal technique approach, or you can also browse our vocal technique article cluster.

When you’re ready for targeted help

If your voice has become weak, unreliable or harder to control for a while, it can be hard to deal with vocal problems and vocal technique troubleshooting by yourself. I work one–to–one with singers who want clear, practical steps to rebuild strength and stability.

December 4, 2025December 7, 2025

Do singers get bored of singing the same songs?

An astute question was asked by a singer this week. They noticed something in their own practice that prompted them to ask “do singers get bored of singing the same songs?”.

Here’s the usual process

The process they experienced is possibly something you’ve noticed yourself

1) You decide to learn a favourite song. It’s an exciting song you’ve always loved.
2) The melody has to be learned first, so you have to spend time learning the song. Slow going but enjoyable.
3) You then sing it a few times badly. This is a bit painful, but you persevere with the promise of a better sound just around the corner.
4) You sing it many more times less badly, and it becomes smoother, but not perfect. Getting there.
5) You now broadly consider that you can sing the song, but you need to keep polishing it

And in the polishing process you discover… you’re getting bored?! What? But you LOVE this song, you’ve spent HOURS trying to learn and refine this song… why are you getting bored of it?

Answer: It’s likely not a song with a lot of depth

Just because a song is incredibly popular, this does NOT make it a great song. It just makes it catchy product.

When most people first start singing, they have to go through a process of both
– self-invention; and
– self-discovery.

You have to both learn to build your instrument, and at the same time, discover what it likes/doesn’t like to do.

The beginner’s voice, as an instrument, isn’t built yet. With proper training they will acquires HEAPS more range, power, tone, etc… so they can’t decide a song is “beyond them” too early.

As a result, most singers with limited training actually have not cultivated any taste or discernment in what it FEELS like to sing songs – how could they? If their instrument is not built more fully, they’ve never been able to sit in the driver’s seat of a more capable voice and note what feels good, what doesn’t feel good, what feels rewarding, what feels punishing to try and deliver. And this is truly a never-ending experience.

To borrow an analogy

It’s a bit like only ever having watched Formula One racing, then thinking you can understand what an easy vs difficult course must be to drive. Even driving fast road cars doesn’t prepare you for it.

It’s only by starting training, and incrementally increasing both your vocal capability AND sensory experience of that capability, that you can start to understand songs more fully.

Hence at the beginning, people often tend to pick very cool sounding songs, but that are not terribly enjoyable or manageable, even for trained voices.

Psssst

If you’d like a list of songs I regularly recommend that have good depth but are approachable by many fledgling singers, here are the top three songs I recommend the most.

How does it FEEL

As people progress through their vocal training, their ear and sense of feel about singing improves. They start to recognise that certain songs FEEL more enjoyable to sing, something about the melody and the way it lies across their voice is incredibly favourable. Those songs become a self-reinforcing loop.

Songs that FEEL good to song, invite the singer to sing them more and more. The act of training becomes almost becomes self-fulfilling: we stop training merely to sound good (or even cool), we train to make it FEEL as good as possible, and that in turn engenders the best quality sound.

I’ve had singers start off wanting to sing hard rock, then they discover just how unpleasant a lot of hard rock is too sing. Even great technique doesn’t make typical rock melodies *feel* any more enjoyable to sing.

Many of these singers slowly metamorphose into lovers of other genres and other singers, whose music is sufficiently challenging but also feel far more enjoyable to sing. Singers like George Michael, for example.

When such singers voices become capable enough, singing such songs created a dramatic sensation of “Woah, this feels amazing”. That’s not to say they sounded perfect immediately, but that sensory feedback loop become noticeable.

They have locked into this sense that the best songs have a depth of feel they can tap into. These typically maps beautifully onto how voices LIKE to function, and it becomes a pleasure to stay locked into songs with such depth.

Brief example

I recently learned “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” by Sting and the Police. Fab song to listen to, and I sing it well if I do say so myself. And yet, so much of the catchiness of that song is in Stewart Copeland’s drum parts, and the variety of backing textures.

Sung solo with piano/guitar, it lacks somewhat… and I got bored quite quickly. I still sing it, but I’m not going to flog a dead horse. Maybe I’ll reinvent an arrangement that works and elevates it, but for now, I’ve put a pin it.

Conclusion: Some songs have more depth than others

You get bored on some songs, because some songs are genuinely boring once you get to know them.

Sometimes the melody is pretty repetitive. Maybe the song’s anthemic feel is more down to the soaring symphonic strings in the background. Or perhaps it’s a beautiful but subtle harmony is lifting the lead vocals to make it pop more than it does when you’re singing it solo. If you’d like a list of features that make songs REALLY difficult to song, I’ve got a ten item list for you right here.

But there’s more songs out there that you just have to get out and explore. I often make recommendations, but it’s highly dependent on whether you like the songs I suggest. Think of it like clothing and fashion. You can browse all you like, but you have to get the piece and try it on for size for a bit to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t.

November 26, 2025November 30, 2025

Singing Confidence: How to get confident in your singing

I was teaching someone this week and the topic of singing confidence came up. There are several articles on my site pertaining to confidence in singing, but I don’t think I’ve talked specifically about this topic of gaining confidence in one’s singing.

Do you relate to this experience?

For some, they’ve never felt confident in their singing. For other singers, they remember being more confident in their singing and their voice. They remember being able to just open their mouth, and a strong, solid, dependable sound came out. Singing was something they enjoyed, looked forward to, and the more they did it, the more confidence it gave them.

But often something shifts as we get older. We start to notice little slips here and there. That vocal tone we were once proud of doesn’t seem to sound quite right – but we’re not sure whether it’s that:

our voice has changed;
we are hearing our voice differently;
our ability to command our voice has changed/suffered; or
some or all of the above.

So when we open our mouth, we are never 100% sure what’s going to come out. It could be good, could be GREAT… but it could also be bad, or even awful.

Worse still, the voice doesn’t behave the same way as we go through a session of singing. Maybe it starts out great, then it deteriorates. Perhaps it starts out a bit rocky and we expect it to improve, but it’s 50/50 whether it ever does.

A lack of certainty = madness

The fundamental issue at play here, is a lack of certainty over the sound our voice will make when we go to sing.

How can you EVER feel confident, if it’s like a flipping a coin every time you go to sing? Worse still, if it feels like it’s 20 sided dice every time you open your mouth – any one of 2-20 different outcomes could occur.

It is 100% impossible to feel comfortable with your singing and your voice under this framework.

The Fallacious Appeal to Emotion

Now at this point, a lot of people want to talk about ‘confidence’ as a by-product of how one feels about their voice. And if we could only make someone FEEL better about their voice, then all would be well.

Firstly, yes, we absolutely need to ensure someone has positive feelings about their voice. But this is NOT achievable in isolation.

Our feelings are variable day to day. How I feel about my voice massively varies day to day. If I’ve not slept well, if I’ve been getting over an illness, if I’m just generally feeling down, all of that will affect how I feel about my voice.

Yet, my voice always performs, and I always have a dispassionate certainty that my voice will be able to do what it needs to do.

That is real confidence, and it is NOT steeped in emotion. It may overlap with emotion, and good feelings about your voice may flow from that objective certainty. But that certainty of outcome is not driven by how you feel – it’s the other way around. How you feel about your voice should be driven by the certainty you have in how your voice will perform.

Easier said than done, so here is the framework we have to follow.

An alternate framework (the only one that works)

Consistency > Certainty > Confidence

Here’s the logic…

The only way to be confident about your voice, is to be 99% certain of what is going to come out of your mouth before you open it to sing.
99% = 99 times out of 100, you know what the outcome will be. That means you need to have put in at least 100 reps of something in your voice, and found 99 reps come out much the same way.
The only way to acquire that level of certainty, is to train your voice in a very predictable consistent manner day to day, in order to iron out that level of consistency and dependability in your voice.
In training in this way, you become so used to the outcome, you become almost blasé about what will happen – you’ve done it so many times you’re basically certain it will happen as before.
THAT’S the kind of confidence we are trying to acquire.

To acquire a consistent voice (that begets certainty), we have to train CONSISTENTLY. This means training the voice in a range that is manageable, to settle it down so it is stress free. That means no hail Mary’s, no pushing for just one more note beyond where you’re comfortable.

If there is ANY variability (ala the ‘coin flipping’ where you’re not sure what’s going to happen) in your day to day training, you are building that variability and uncertainty into your voice.

The ONLY way to cultivate a voice that ALWAYS behaves in a way that you can predict and trust, you must TRAIN in a range and a manner that your voice cannot go wrong.

Don’t stop yourself mid-exercise – complete each exercise, and assess how well it went. If it went awry several times – it’s not consistent enough to rely on, so you cannot expect certainty nor the resultant confidence.

And to get to 99% certainty, that’s 99 attempts out of 100 yielding an expected and predictable result – which means you need to put in 100 reps, minimum. There’s no escaping the body of work you need to put in to acquire this certainty. You can’t just will yourself into confidence.

Most people don’t train like this. They keep flinging their voice at songs, stopping and starting, abandoning repetitions and lines of songs midway, or even after the first note. This isn’t just a waste of time, you are TRAINING uncertainty into your voice.

Why the above framework delivers

As boring as this may seem, and as restrictive as this may appear, it’s necessary.

When you do this, you’ll remove any stress response in your voice over that controlled range.

As this stress response abates, your range will grow slightly. You’ll then iron out that new range with that same consistent approach, and your range will increase slightly again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

And throughout all of this, that initial range you’re working on and that new range you’re adding – you don’t notice that you’re singing higher, as it feels just as easy as the initial “boring” range you started with.

Conclusion: Practice to build certainty

All confidence lies in certainty of the outcome. If we lack consistency in our voice and our practice, certainty and confidence will always remain elusive.

If this all “sounds great” but you’re not sure how to deploy this in your own voice, you can start work with my by clicking the ‘Work with Mark’ button below.

November 16, 2025November 16, 2025

The Three Notes Every Singer Struggles With

Today I want to talk about the three notes that every singer struggles with.

A few caveats:

Individual singers will typically only struggle with ONE of these at a time – Because if they are struggling with the first of these, they won’t be doing subsequent ones any justice at all.
These notes are the lynchpin root causes of vocal problems – Once I state the notes, singers reading this will say “ah well, I am personally fine with that one, it’s the note one above/below that I find hard“. That may well be their interpretation of what they think they are noticing, but these are merely symptoms of the underlying issue. The root causes of people’s perceived vocal limitations are these specific notes.

The Notes

The notes are: E4 – A4 – E5.

These are grouped for men and woman as:

For men: E4 and A4
For women: A4 and E5

What are these notes?

The way the voice works, is that to sing low notes the vocal folds contract and thicken. To sing high notes they stretch and thin. The sound emitted by the vocal folds is shaped by the vocal tract, which is the length of your throat above your larynx (Adam’s apple).

These two components acoustically interact with each other to generate a phenomenon we call ‘vocal bridges’ or passagi/passagio. To sing with any meaningful range, we need to be able to cross these bridges – at least the first bridge, and ideally the second also.

The Bridges

For men the first bridge is E4-F#4; the second is A4-B4.

For women the first bridge is A4-B4; the second is E5-F#5.

You’ll note that the male second bridge maps exactly onto the female first bridge.

The bridge exists over several notes, rather than just one note. It’s a transition zone from one register of the voice to the next. Hence, the three key notes are E4, A4 and E5.

However, the challenge I’m focusing on today is the difficulty in ENTERING each bridge cleanly. Landing the E4 to enter the first bridge for men/the A4 for women, is CRITICAL.

So many tend to either struggle to land that note at all, or they are technically hitting the note, but they are hitting it so hard they’ve not actually ENTERED the bridge. When excess force or imprecision exists in the vowels, they are just slamming their voice hard enough to force the vocal folds to hit the right pitch… but this does not mean they’ve made the acoustic transition INTO the bridge properly.

If the singer is not entering the first bridge cleanly, they cannot exit it cleanly to hit higher notes with ease and power. Think of it like clipping the first hurdle in a hurdle race. If you can’t even clear the first one cleanly, you’re not going anywhere well.

What about the second bridge?

The first bridge only provides the transition from chest to the first register within head voice. The second bridge is the next transition zone above that. Many more skilled singers (e.g. Bono of U2), actually have reasonably good first bridges, but they struggle at their second. This is why so often singers will lower songs when performing to put top notes on an Ab4, to avoid the A4 – that’s the second bridge revealing itself.

The same is true for women dealing with their first and second bridges. Often younger women have more facility at their first bridge than younger men, so they ‘vault over it’ and enjoy the range between the first and second bridge. But over time the deepening and thickening of their voice causes them to struggle with a clean entry/exit to the first bridge, so they can feel like they’ve lost a load of range in later life – often by their mid 30s.

Proper vocal training resolves this

These are only the reasons why people struggle with these notes, and correspondingly find higher notes than those hard to consistently sing.

Proper vocal training is all about co-ordinating the vocal folds and vocal tract, to co-ordinate the voice to smoothly cross those bridges, such that they become invisible to the singer and the listenable. This is all entirely solveable, to unlock ever increasing range, with greater ease and wonderful tone. it just takes time and concerted effort. Which is why most singers never reach it. It seems far ‘easier’ just to keep jamming your voice and forcing your way to that note that is 50/50 whether it comes out.

But now you’re at least equipped with knowing WHY you find specific notes difficult in your voice. It may feel like you get stuck at a note above or below the ones I’ve mentioned, but I can assure you that the mechanical and acoustic reason you find any part of your voice tricky, is because of these bridging notes.

If this echoes with your experience in your voice, and you feel you’re clipping any of these notes, you can book in via the work with me button below.

November 8, 2025November 9, 2025

Songs That Sound Similar – 2000s

I was at the gym when a song came on that both sounded familiar, yet I didn’t truly recognise. We’ve all had that ‘songs that sound similar’ phenomenon occur to us, so I thought it was worth diving into using this specific example.

It took a while to find it, but it was this:

Save Me – Remy Zero

This was released in 2003 by Remy Zero, a band from Birmingham, Alabama. It rose to fame as the theme tune to the TV show Smallville.

Now, I’ve never seen Smallville, so that wasn’t the reason it sounded familiar. It sounded familiar because many songs from that same era were cut from the same cloth.

Similar band make-up, similar genre, similar songwriting, similar vocals, similar hooks, even similar studio production techniques.

Why So Many Early 2000s Songs Sound Alike

Between the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a particular sound that dominated alternative and soft rock. Many songs sounded alike in this genre – melodic male vocals, open guitar chords, atmospheric production, and emotional but restrained choruses. Artists often borrowed from U2’s stadium rock sound and fused it with post-grunge sensitivity.

This “cinematic alt-rock” sound was perfect for film soundtracks and TV intros in the 00s — soaring enough to feel epic, yet clean enough for radio play. It’s why so many of these tracks still feel instantly recognisable today.

Three Key Traits to Listen Out For

Style and song structure – verse-to-chorus lift, clean guitar layers, restrained dynamics.
Male vocal timbre – slightly breathy, emotional delivery with a bright upper register.
Chorus melody – it rises higher than the verse and follows similar melodic arcs.

Other Songs with the Same Hallmarks

Beautiful Day – U2

This Is Your Life – Switchfoot

Drops of Jupiter – Train

Tourist – Athlete

Final Thoughts

Which one is your favourite?

Next time you’re listening to songs from your favourite era of music, try and wrack your brain and think: what other songs are similar to this one? You’ll be surprised how many songs mirror (if not outright copy) the template laid down by others.

November 2, 2025November 14, 2025

Five Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting Singing Lessons

There are things I wish I knew before I started singing lessons. If you have ever started down a path of learning in a given discipline, I’m sure there’s things you look back on and think “I wish I had known THAT back at the beginning”. Those moments that make you slap your forehead and wonder — why did no one tell me this at the start? How much time would have been saved? Where could I be now if I had known that?

That’s the intent of today’s article. Or at least, I’ll share the five things that stand out to me as worthy of note to my personal journey.

1) Never Force It — Why Power Isn’t Progress

We’ve all been there. Wanting to hit a given note, maybe we are struggling to make the note or maybe we are AT the note but it needs a bit more oomph. So we lay down the hammer and hit it harder. Even in my own voice, I remember for years trying for notes and just giving it a few percent more power to make it sound bigger. But this is a dead end in the medium- and long-term.

Why? Sure, it may feel satisfying physically to hit notes harder, and in more skilled singers further application of air pressure and power to get a fuller and more powerful note is critical… but far too many beginners and intermediate singers apply far too much power, far too early in their development.

This compromises the quality in the moment, like someone forcing out a rep at the gym with bad form and too much weight. They might make it in the moment, but it damages the body, reinforces bad habits and neurological stress, that we then need to unpick in training. This needless tensing of the instrument at the earlier stages of development can add years of extra time to correct training.

2) It’s All About Finesse — Learning to Do Less, Better

This is a natural follow on from point 1. If we recognise that an appropriate level of force is critical at every level, then the natural position to adopt is one of finesse. Not simply to “NOT force”, but to move to a more refined and finessed approach to moving through the voice – in exercise and in song.

Many reading this may nod in agreement, but I really do mean finesse. As in, it feels more like gentle, light movement through the vote, not big heavy, lumbering steps through the voice. This is especially true the higher we want to sing in our voices.

The difficulty is, it doesn’t FEEL sexy to do this. It FEELS like something is going wrong, especially for the male singer. It can feel like it’s all a little light, or not solid enough. Yet this is 100% necessary to both build technique, but also to build neurological ease into using the voice. We want the body to get a sense that singing is meant to be smooth, fluid, easy, mechanically light to do… and this is very hard to accept for many singers.

3) How It Sounds vs. How It Feels Inside Are Often Divergent

This is also a natural follow on from point 2. Once we accept we cannot force things, we are to move from THAT end of the spectrum to the other end – the end of finesse.

In doing so we then have to face that how it feels and sounds inside our head, vs how it sounds out front, can be wildly divergent. When we start to reject excess force, embrace finesse – however it feels – we will have to face that feeling of “are you SURE this is right?”.

The finessed approach doesn’t feel quite as rewarding physically as hitting the note harder, and may often feel very counter-intuitive. There are times in lessons I’ll actively tell people to pull back the intensity at critical entries to bridges, and there is look of confusion on the part of the singer. Surely to make this sound and feel right, I’ve got to hit it at least a LITTLE harder?

Sure, sometimes, but only after relative mastery has been acquired. In the first instance, to accept that goal of finesse, we have to accept that how it feels and how it sounds out front are often divergent.

Which leads us onto point 4!

4) Record Yourself and Listen Back — The Mirror for Singers

So we’ve established that hitting the voice harder isn’t right, and finesse therefore must be our goal. That then leads to accepting that how it feels versus how it sounds can be very different, how can we verify and slowly reconcile the two?

The answer: record yourself and listen back CONSTANTLY. Using your phone, your computer, dictaphones, etc, to record yourself singing individual lines all the way through to complete songs. Then listen back. Then go again.

Professional dancers rehearse in front of wall to wall mirrors so that they can reconcile how they THINK a move feels/looks, with what it ACTUALLY looks like. Recording ourselves and listening back is the vocal equivalent of this. This is the only way to slowly acclimate ourselves with how we think something sounds, with how it actually sounds.

And doing it once isn’t enough. Dancers will do it every day, repeatedly. We must do the same. Over time our internal sense of calibration will slowly shift to mirror what is actually happening out front. This then makes it easier to self monitor without always having to record and listen back.

And yes, this is a deeply painful experience. To have to listen to yourself, warts and all, and hear how you actually sound over and over. But it is essential – the longer a singer puts off doing this, the slower their vocal development.

5) It Takes Time — The Long Game of Vocal Development

The final point to make is that building a voice takes time. Hitting the voice harder isn’t a path to success – there are no shortcuts.

Instead, finesse is a very slow refined angle to approach along. Every day we must try to create a more and more precise movement in our voices, across helpful exercises, and then deploying that along challenging songs.

Recording ourselves on helpful songs is also time-consuming, and the many reps this takes also takes time.

Overall, we can make MASSIVE strides in giving someone initial access to a new level of vocal function within just one session. But making sure that someone trains in a way that instils and ingrains that behaviour in a finessed way, that feels and sounds congruent and natural to them… that takes time even when done correctly. If we stray off the path and try to hit things harder, avoid critical listening, this can massively increase the time it takes to improve a voice to the level they want to sing at.

Take heart: the progress is worth the patience. Every singer who learns to do less, listen better, and stay the course discovers a voice that not only works — it lasts.